Monday, March 28, 2016

“It is the main business of the family and the school to influence directly the formation and growth of attitudes and dispositions, emotional, intellectual and moral. Whether this educative process is carried on in a predominantly democratic or non-democratic way becomes…a question of transcendent importance not only for education itself but for…the democratic way of life.” John Dewey, Democracy in the Schools

We face an avalanche of privatization of education at every level, tied to narrowing views which

radically shrink the meaning of democracy and of education. This avalanche increasingly

renders education as a ticket for individual advancement, not public purpose. Education is more

segregated by race and class than in the time of Brown v. Board of Education. Educators feel

increasingly powerless. At the same time education is under widespread attack, with efforts to

shape both K-12 and higher education by outside interests and policy makers, both liberal and

conservative, using marketplace and technocratic rationales. State government in many states

are defunding public post-secondary education. Costs put many schools out of the reach of poor

and working classes. All this contributes to the disempowerment of educators and students.

Internal changes as well as external forces erode the agency of educators and students.

Studies such as American Academic Culture in Transformation, edited by Thomas Bender and

Carl Schorske have demonstrated that research cultures have become increasingly detached

from community and the public culture in many fields in recent decades. Rankings fuel what

All these are foundations to build on. Yet the dynamic trends of privatization and technocracy

continue to gather momentum on campuses, in curriculum and in educational policy. How can

we reimagine a public educational ecosystem with revitalized democratic aims, and effectively

work to enact it in practice, policy, and law?

We are convinced that this is the time to work with others in organizing a democracy movement

of K-16 educators and students and our allies, reimagining education as crucial to a democratic

way of life for ourselves and for future generations, advancing policies that support democracy

education, and creating strategies to build broad publics. Here are several potential elements:

Strategy, grounded in local, grassroots effort, needs to include state and national prongs of action, across educational sectors and in diverse coalitions of community and civic organizations. Many tools will be necessary for this work, including public deliberation, organizing, experimentation, research, and a robust strategy of what can be called “cultural organizing, stimulating wide public discussion in many media settings.

Deliberations and organizing efforts need to be informed by research and scholarship that is transdisciplinary not simply interdisciplinary. This means recognizing that while academic scholars are creating new knowledge of great value we also need new patterns of collaborative knowledge-creation and infrastructures and reward systems which support them, recognizing the multiple kinds of knowledge needed for effective political democratic change.

At local and regional levels, we need new strategies for deliberation and organizing action for change that builds new, deeper, more reciprocal relationships with scholars and schools, students, parents and families, civic groups and local governments, asking “why” and “so what” questions with new forcefulness.

At the state level where much education policy is established, we need to “bring the public in,” creating citizen-based deliberations about the purposes of education at every level. Representatives and participants from schools, teachers unions, families, businesses, religious and civic groups, and community organizations as well as local governments will need to be involved.

We also need ways to bring findings of public deliberations to new levels of public visibility through new media tools and through partnerships with sympathetic journalists and opinion-makers in the mainstream media. This will be essential to effect a significant shift from the narrow test-based accountability that lawmakers and others have devised in the last two decades.

At the federal level, we need a variety of strategies to engage a new administration with the Deweyan vision of democracy as a way of life and education as its midwife.

A democratic education vision for K-16 publicly supported education in the U.S. and for policies

that strengthen the democratic purposes of private and liberal arts education will require

leadership in all sectors, from all corners of educational practice, policy, and research. How to

develop such leadership will require discussion and thought about what is the appropriate

organizing form and structure for such work. But the need seems unmistakable.

In our history, democracy had overtones of immensity. "A word the real gist of which still sleeps,

quite unawakened...a great word, whose history remains unwritten," as Walt Whitman put it in

Thursday, March 24, 2016

The 2016
John Dewey Society Annual Meeting will be held
concurrently with the American Educational Research Association Meeting
in Washington, D.C. from Friday, April 8 through Tuesday, April 12, 2016.

Dewey and Democracy, and the Question of the Experience,
Engagement and Perceptions of Pre-service Teachers: Examining the Neoliberal Context in Relation to the Influence of
Non-formal Education on Formal Education

The Role of Ethnodrama/Drama in Youth-led Organizing and Data
Analysis

Sarah Hobson, SUNY Cortland

Minority youth responses to the lack of diversity in selective
enrollment high schools in the south

Sophia Rodriguez, College of Charleston

The Social Justice Education Project: Transforming Second Sight
into Critical Consciousness through YPAR

Julio Cammarota, Iowa State University

Historic Lounge

Journal session: Educational Philosophy and Theory

Dewey‘s Democracy and Education in an Era of Globalization

Empathy and Imagination in Education

Andrea English, University of Edinburgh

Why Should Scholars Keep Coming Back to John Dewey?

Mordechai Gordon, Quinnipiac University

Globalization, Democracy, and Social Movements: Activism as the
Point

Kathy Hytten, University of North Carolina – Greensboro

Complexity and Reductionism in Educational Philosophy – John
Dewey’s Critical Approach in “Democracy and Education” Reconsidered

Jim Garrison, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

6:30pm-7:30pm

Wine and Cheese Reception

Gymnasium

April
7 First Day Only Location: The
Thurgood Marshall Center for Service
and Heritage is located at 1816 12th Street between “S” and “T” Streets in
Northwest Washington, D.C., just a few blocks from the U Street –
African-American Civil War Museum – Cardozo Metro Station (Green and Yellow
Lines).

FRIDAY, April 8

Walter E. Washington Convention Center (the site of AERA 2016)

Level One, Rooms 103A and 103B

8:00am-9:15am

Concurrent Session 5

Convention Center, Level One, Room 103A

Panel, Sponsored by the AERA Dewey Studies SIG

Centennial Reflections

Deron Boyles, Georgia State University

Jim Garrison, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

William Wraga, University of Georgia

Peter Hlebowitsh, University of Alabama

Discussant: Craig Cunningham, National-Louis University

Chair: Susan Meyer, Independent Scholar

Convention Center, Level One, Room 103B

Presentation/Workshop: Dewey and the Role of the Arts in
Education and Culture

Jeff Poulin,
Americans for the Arts

9:30am-10:45am

Concurrent Session 6

Convention Center, Level One, Room 103A

Panel, Sponsored by AERA Division F

Democracy and Education in History and Social Studies Education

Wayne Urban, Moderator, University of Alabama

“Lab High: Where New Ideas Meet Encouragement”

Sharon Pierson, Ramapo College

Dewey and the Institute of Child Study, Toronto

Theodore Christou, Queen‘s University,
Ontario

“Democracy and Education as a Founding Document for Social
Studies”

Benjamin M. Jacobs, George Washington University

“Dewey: Historic Film Footage”

Craig Kridel, University of South Carolina

Discussant: Susan F. Semel, The City College of New York

Convention Center, Level One, Room 103B

Panel, Sponsored by AERA Philosophical Studies of Education SIG

Agency and Activism: Reframing Teaching through Dewey’s
Democracy and Education

“First Among Equals: The Roles of Teachers in Educational Publics”

Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Miami University

“The Politics of Civic Agency and Education for Democracy”

Harry Boyte, Augsburg College

Margaret Finders, Augsburg College

“Using Dewey to Support Agency and Activism in Teachers”

Sarah M. Stitzlein, University of Cincinnati

“Teacher Intelligence in the Face of Fidelity”

Doris A. Santoro, Bowdoin College

Session Chair: Terri S. Wilson, University of Colorado -Boulder

11:00am-12:20pm

Keynote General Session 2

Convention Center, Level One, Room 103A

Dewey Lives! Big Picture, the Met, and College Unbound

Dennis Littky, Big Picture Learning and College Unbound

John Dewey Society Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

We Were the Lucky Ones: Students from the Progressive

Schools of the 1930s Speak Out

Jane Roland Martin, Emerita, University of Massachusetts

John Dewey Society Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

12:20pm

The Centennial Conference ends

12:30pm

John Dewey Society Annual Meeting begins

Convention Center, Level One, Room 103A

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The
Centennial Conference is co-sponsored by the following organizations:

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Social Issues is a blog maintained by the John Dewey Society's Commission on Social Issues.

The Commission exists to encourage reflection on pressing social, cultural and educational issues and to support communications among members of the John Dewey Society and concerned publics on these issues.